Visible in Search · by Source of You
Search doesn’t find people by luck.
When your name is searched, or an AI is asked who you are, five mechanics decide what comes back. None of them are secrets, and none of them are tricks. This page explains all five in plain language.
A page you own
Engines need a canonical home for your name. Rented profiles rank for their platform first; a page you own exists to answer exactly one question: who you are.
One consistent story
Engines cross-check sources. When your resume, profiles, and bio disagree on titles, dates, or even your name's spelling, confidence drops and someone else's version wins.
Structured data
Person schema in the page tells engines exactly who the page is about, instead of leaving them to guess from prose. It is the difference between being parsed and being skimmed.
Corroboration
Claims a stranger can verify on pages you do not control: employer sites, talks, press, publications. Self-assertion alone reads as marketing; corroborated claims read as fact.
Freshness
Stale pages decay in ranking and in answers. A current page with a real last-updated signal keeps surfacing; an abandoned one slowly disappears, taking your answer with it.
Canonical URL
The one address that counts as the official copy of a page. Everything else should point at it.
JSON-LD
Machine-readable facts embedded in a page: name, role, links. The format engines parse for identity.
AEO
Answer engine optimization: structuring true information so AI assistants can read, trust, and cite it.
llms.txt
A plain-text index that tells AI systems what a site contains and which pages speak for whom.
Answer engine
A system that answers the question directly (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI) instead of returning links.
Why does my name not show up on Google?
Usually mechanics, not mystery: no page you own answering for your name, thin or conflicting profiles, and nothing structured for engines to parse. Each one is fixable.
Do I need a personal website to be visible in search?
You need one crawlable page you own that states who you are in real text with structured data. That can be a single source page; a full website is optional.
What is answer engine optimization?
AEO is the practice of publishing true, structured, corroborated information so AI assistants can read and cite it. It is the AI-era counterpart of SEO: legibility instead of tricks.
How long does it take for search to see changes?
Crawl cadence varies by engine and by page authority; days to weeks is typical, and nobody can honestly promise a date. A canonical page with a sitemap gets discovered faster than scattered profiles.
Make the mechanics work for you.
Build your record free. Source of You Pro publishes it as a crawlable, structured page: Person schema, one canonical URL, an llms.txt index. All five mechanics, handled.